Rackspace Hosting has announced a new offering for its Managed Virtualisation Service hosting a VMware environment, entitled ‘Dedicated VMware vCenter Server’.

This is an interesting change, given how Rackspace’s most recent focus has been on OpenStack technologies instead of VMware.

Currently, the Managed Virtualisation service offers partial accessibility to vCenter’s features, but not full management capabilities. The theory, according to Rackspace, is that the dedicated environment will be an extension of the customer’s data centre.

What does this all mean? Essentially, it’s pushing more into Rackspace’s hybrid cloud policy.

“This new service has been designed to enable customers to migrate workloads out of their data centre and into a Rackspace data centre,” said John Engates, Rackspace CTO in a statement.

“Utilising Rackspace’s hybrid cloud portfolio gives customers the choice to find the best fit for their applications and workloads, all while offloading data centre …

Join us and guests Kim Celestre, Forrester Research Senior Analyst, and Bill Hussey, Manager of Developing Platforms at Bell Media, for this compelling educational webinar on Wednesday, August 21, 2013, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific. Kim will share Forrester’s Total Economic Impact report to show you the specific, hard-dollar results businesses have driven by engaging customer communities with gamification.
Forrester will provide real life data on how companies leveraging gamification have:
Dramatically increased customer retention revenue
Significantly lowered product support costs
Sourced innovative ideas through the community
From Bell Media, you will learn how they drove up registrations and fan engagement, ultimately driving greater value for advertisers and their brand.

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Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is now a Corporate Sponsor of OpenStack – as can be seen today at the ever-impressive (and constantly expanding) list of sponsoring companies at the OpenStack Foundation web site. The OpenStack Foundation was the Diamond (top) Sponsor of 11th Cloud Expo / Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, held just under a year ago at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, California.

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Straight from our experts at VMware, follow these technical tips to learn what you need to know to get started with VMware vCloud Hybrid Service. From choosing the right service offering to migrating your workloads and administering resources, reference these tips as you extend your data center to the cloud.

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Part 2 of Cloud Monitoring Essentials presents 3 key actions to ensure that cloud users maintain a strong security posture.
The cloud offers users agility and flexibility at, potentially, a far lower cost than a traditional data center model. However, with these benefits come risks from cost sprawl, security holes, and availability management. Part 1 of Cloud Monitoring Essentials focused on cost concerns. This second part looks at security.
The dynamic nature of the cloud, with ever-changing security groups and rules, makes security difficult. New instances, auto scaling groups, and buckets are created and terminated daily. Resources that were ‘secure’ yesterday may be altered today and your security posture may be compromised.
The distributed and centralized nature of the cloud creates security headaches. Not only is the deployment regularly changing, but the people changing it are across groups and departments.

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When Melrose transitioned from nearly 100 percent server virtualization to a novel cloud capability built on VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, they discovered that they could not only host their own applications, but also those of nearby communities for an ongoing fee.

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“Our proven technology is displacing legacy boxes that were designed for yesterday’s storage needs across a wide range of industries. What they have in common is breakneck growth of storage needs that were poorly addressed by old-fashioned products from EMC and others,» said John Morris, president and CEO of Cleversafe, as announced that the company has secured $55 million in funding to support its growth momentum, achieved by its breakthrough technology’s cost-saving solution for massive-scale, high-growth storage needs

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“Our proven technology is displacing legacy boxes that were designed for yesterday’s storage needs across a wide range of industries. What they have in common is breakneck growth of storage needs that were poorly addressed by old-fashioned products from EMC and others,» said John Morris, president and CEO of Cleversafe, as announced that the company has secured $55 million in funding to support its growth momentum, achieved by its breakthrough technology’s cost-saving solution for massive-scale, high-growth storage needs

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By Russell Crawford, Regional Director UK&I, Netherlands, Africa, Cortado AG

The use of cloud services is rising continuously for both private and public companies. In fact, analysts predict a growth in the enterprise cloud market from $18.3 billion in 2012 to $31.9 billion in 2017.

This rise of cloud services is due to the increase in the use of smartphones and tablets. These devices usually only have a limited storage capacity, but are often used as PC replacements when on the go, both privately and professionally, which is why mobile users like to store their data in the cloud and access it conveniently via the internet. With the cloud, all relevant documents can be accessed in just a few clicks, and can be shared quickly with friends, relatives or colleagues.

But many companies are still undecided about the cloud. The biggest obstacle is the significant concern over …